Sunday, April 18, 2010

Bonsai Trees

My dad's been toying with a little bonsai tree for a while. His bears no resemblance to the above sketch; in fact, it's actually a lot cooler looking because it bends down to be parallel to the ground and lines up with its oval pot. It's not fully styled though, which means that it still basically looks like a potted plant instead of a potted tree. We spent some time today trying to figure out what parts to clip off to make it look more tree-like, but it turns out to be pretty difficult to visualize what effect the clipping will have until after its done.

Edit: As a side note, the sketch accompanying this post is the latest in a long line of proofs for my "drawing foliage is hard" conjecture. I tried to draw this one really quickly because (a) as usual, I want to get to sleep and (b) I'd like to be able to use foliage as a subordinate element in visualization sketches.